Today I saw a seal. A black labrador’s head, I thought at first. And then it bobbed, and sank, and didn’t reappear. A man further down the beach was staring at the same spot, around fifteen metres out past the wooden groyne I was perched on. He saw the seal, too. Or he was just a man standing, staring at the rippling silver steel chill of the estuary. He gave up before I did. I couldn’t let that seal get away.
Now, I check the NatureScot website. I am sure it was a harbour seal, given the description of dog-like heads. Harbour seals are more commonly found on the west coast. Here on the east coast it’s a win to see one.
The last time I saw a seal as close to the shore in Edinburgh, I was standing in my kitchen up on the fourth floor of the tenement, watching the water with my binoculars. My friend Kristine was swimming, and the seal was directly behind her. She had no idea it was there. Kristine was swimming and smiling and I wanted to shout ‘behind you, behind you.’
Are you swimming with seals when you don’t know they’re there?
Kristine and I met at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary in the mid 1980s. We were nursing students. She was compassionate, bright, and dedicated. I was indifferent, nervous, and offended by the regiment-style hierarchy in the hospital. Kristine had transferred from Inverness to Edinburgh half way through her course. The pair of us stormed the community nursing module. She played Velvet Underground’s Heroin on a small cassette player. Or maybe it was Sunday Morning. Or Venus in Furs. Either way, the class was agog, aghast. Especially the Stornaways. The Stornaways were always agog, aghast.
I did an acetate presentation about the communities living in Wester Hailes. Handed grainy black and white photographs around the class. Broken lifts. Sopping carpets. Weary women. Children on trikes. Roads with no footpaths. Vast empty carparks. Wheelchairs with broken arms. A thriving community centre with lentil soup and art classes and thick Scottish buttered rolls. I’d developed the photographs myself.
I won a prize for the Westerhails project. It was the highlight of a below average three years for me. But really, Kristine should have won.
Later she said I was the only person in the class to welcome her. I struggle to imagine that was true. What was wrong with the rest of them?
Kristine was the only friend I had who owned a car. The only friend who lived in a flat that looked like a home. With dripping candles in brass candlesticks and fairy lights wrapped around mirrors and plump cream cotton cushions and dinner parties with three courses and matching cutlery and compassion that was biblical.
Kristine was there the night my partner took his own life. She kept me above water for months, years. She was there even when she wasn’t.
As I staggered through my grief, I failed my final nursing module and had to repeat it. I was sent to work on a ward for terminally ill children. Kristine finished her training and went on to get her pelican badge (awarded to students who completed a year as a staff nurse at the Royal Infimary). I didn’t look for a post in the Infirmary and wasn’t offered one. I was scunnered.
I left nursing and went travelling. Moved to New Zealand. Went to university. Became a policy wonk at the Ministry for the Environment. Kristine wrote me neat letters with black ink on thin blue aerogrammes. One mentioned cancer. A melanoma behind her eye. I wasn’t to panic, she wrote. She’d had it removed in a specialist unit in Liverpool. Everything was fine. She kept studying. Kept training. Kept pushing herself. Community nursing. Midwifery. CPD. So much CPD.
I returned to the UK with £50 and started again. Kristine married Kenny. They settled in Pitlochry. Their home was warm and welcoming and full of friends and musicians and cases of wine and languid cheese and home-baking and bits and bobs I’d picked up round the world for her. Tibetan prayer flags. A bottle of Sikkim whisky. A brass singing bowl.
One night she texted. Do you want to see Leonard Cohen at Edinburgh Castle? I went online, she wrote, to buy a couple of tickets and thought I may as well buy eight. My treat, she said. I did and we went.
Hallelujah.
She did her Masters degree while she was working full time. She was tired. Exhausted even. She talked about leaving nursing. Aromatherapy, she said. And massage. I want to do something positive, she said. Something to make people feel good. But there were always reasons to delay the change in career.
We didn’t see each other often but when we did we hung out in book shops and bought each other treats and shouted about inequalities and how fucked up the world was. We drank bitter coffee and she chewed her thumb and she failed to give up smoking. I begged, bribed and threatened. To no avail. She went on to become the specialist palliative service manager at Cornhill Macmillan Centre in Perth. I was so proud to call her my friend.
The night she phoned me to tell me the cancer was back she was so off-hand that I thought she was talking about someone else. I had to call her back to check.
I couldn’t stop crying.
I pulled myself together and tried to give her the best of myself. Sent her soft expensive scarfs to wear during the long hours of her treatment. Stylish at all times, I wrote in the cards with the packages. I sent books that were easy to read. Poetry. And postcards from wherever I was in foreign parts. Of course the reality was that she was supporting all of us through her illness. I couldn’t imagine life without her.
She took me to Gleneagles for a spa. The staff there wouldn’t allow her to have a spa treatment because of her cancer. She didn’t argue. She just waited for me. We drank fizz and we talked about her life and her death and she was so damn pragmatic.
I visited her a few weeks before she died. Went up on the train from Edinburgh. It was a bright clear day in Pitlochry and we ate lunch outside. Salad with leaves from their garden. A glass vase of late spring flowers sat in the centre of the table. There was soup and home-made bread. She was wearing thin grey cotton shorts and a white short-sleeved blouse. She adored the sun. She was pale and puffy and smiley. We drank chilled white wine. She apologised for the cigarette, blowing her smoke away from the food. Now, she said, down to business. She had organised her memorial service (there’d be no funeral) and she gave me all my instructions. Would I speak on behalf of her friends? She’d give me the email addresses of everyone, but she didn’t want to know what they’d write. Yes, I said, of course.
Kristine died at home as she wanted on 1 July, 2014. She was fifty one. She managed every detail of her death, and every detail of the celebration of her life a week later at the Atholl Palace Hotel. I read out the tributes from her friends, and the John O’Donohue poem ‘For Friendship’ that she’d chosen.
And I read out Raymond Carver’s ‘Late Fragment’:
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth
I mostly held it together for my beloved friend.
The last text on my phone from Kristine was on 20 June, 2014. It says: Swim 🙂 – think out ‘tidal’ paths!?! Kxo
Are you swimming with seals when you don’t know they’re there?
SANDERLINGS 